The Beatles had incredible talent and drive, but it was their playful collaboration that changed everything. They weaved together pop, psychedelia, folk, Indian music, soul, and classical in profoundly new ways. That elasticity transformed the concept of popular music.

Many businesses have talent and drive, but all too often, they try to fit too neatly into their category through well-executed but boring reflections of expectation. 

Breakthrough companies emerge from the improvisational interplay of ideas from the creators—from earned experience, intuition, diversity, and wisdom. They punt the playbook to just play, to feel the elasticity of their offering.

How are you harnessing the strange beauty of a diverse team to create something awe-inducing? 

With love, 

Dave

Elasticity: How and Why to Break the Rules

Dani Grant and her team were stuck. 

For the first eighteen months after launching their company, Jam.dev, which helps developers fix bugs, they had zero users, despite lots of effort. 

Then they grew to 95,000 in under two years. 

What changed? 

When she and Mohd Irtefa started the company, Dani and her team knew they had “problem-market fit.” Bug-fixing was broken: the back-and-forth with engineers was slow and painful. She had struggled with the same issues as a developer. 

The only question was how to fix it and find product-market fit. 

She conducted 45 user interviews and built an MVP (minimum viable product). 

Lots of people signed up, but nobody used the product. 

She launched six more attempts at a solution. Still, no one used it. 

Frustrated but focused, she took a different approach on the eighth attempt. And everything changed. 

Instead of following the accepted startup rules, she followed her intuition. Here are three rules and how the Jam team blew them up. 

As Dani explains, “That was 15 years ago. There’s way more competition today. The project must be production-ready.” They decided not to release the eighth version until it was ready for prime-time and bug-free. 

Dani’s team learned that when users churn, you don’t get feedback—and what you do get doesn’t get you very far. 

They decided to first use it themselves and not give it to a single external user until they would miss the product if it were gone. 

After three weeks, Dani said, “The product got so much better than if we had released it to users and done three months of iteration.” 

“We shipped seven ‘cars’ that had no usage,” she says. Finally, they produced what users had been telling them they wanted. 

That’s when things went bonkers. The user base doubled every three months and kept going. Jam now creates 250,000 monthly reports—up from 25,000 a year ago. 

Are you built for this kind of breakthrough? Can you see through the scaffolding of rules and playbooks holding you back? 

Ideas for Creating Elasticity in Your Work

1. Remove your identity: The ancient Greeks believed each person has their own “daemon,” a divine spirit that guides, inspires, and protects. This is valuable because it removes our ego from the equation. We identify less with the outcomes and immerse ourselves in the process. As Ed Catmull says in his book Creativity, Inc. (about Pixar): “You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”

2. Build for diversity: Often, leaders surround themselves with people who think like them and don’t question their judgment. This form of narcissism kills innovation. Shared values, openness, and curiosity, combined with diverse backgrounds and experiences is the ideal set of characteristics for creating elasticity in product thinking. 

3. Break some rules, not others: Is there a rule for which rules to break? I don’t know. If there were, you should probably break it. Try breaking a bunch and see what happens. Does it lead to a breakthrough? A source of sustainable advantage? Or does it create chaos? Or inadvertently hurt people? All that matters is you question the status quo and see it as an opportunity to stand out amidst the vanilla crap littering the marketplace. 

Thanks so much for reading. If you know of someone who would benefit from this content, please send it their way with this link.

With Love,

Dave